No Great Wall: Trade, Tariffs, and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927–1945 by Felix Boecking

Abstract

Reviewed by: No Great Wall: Trade, Tariffs, and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927–1945 by Felix Boecking Jeremy Tai Felix Boecking. No Great Wall: Trade, Tariffs, and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927–1945. Harvard East Asian Monograph Series. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017. 280 pp. $39.95 (cloth). Decades after the publication of Lloyd Eastman's The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1939 in 1974,1 historians of Republican China continue to assess the successes and failures of the Guomindang's rule in mainland China. Building on the field's foundational question of who lost China, explanations of the limits, shortcomings, and missteps of the Guomindang state have included the lack of a social base, factionalism, ineffectual administration, runaway military expenditures, increasing extraction and extortion, the collapse of social welfare, and widespread discontent voiced in popular media. At the same time, revisionist studies have drawn attention to what the Guomindang was able to achieve before the outbreak of war with Japan, often centering on technocratic transformations of the state, industry, and cities. Felix Boecking's No Great Wall: Trade, Tariffs, and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927–1945 attempts to provide another layer of nuance by turning to the Maritime Customs Service, whose collection of duties provided the Guomindang with its greatest source of revenue, and arguing for effective fiscal management during the Nanjing Decade. Long mired in controversy as a symbol of the treaty system, the Maritime Customs Service was a Chinese government agency headed by a foreign inspector general and eventually serviced China's indemnity payments and foreign loans. Building on the work of John Fairbank as well as recent studies by Hans van de Ven and Robert Bickers,2 Boecking attempts to move scholarly inquiries beyond analyses of imperialism to consider how the Guomindang was willing to accommodate an "informal imperial institution" in order to maintain a steady source of revenue, appear politically reliable to foreign powers, and modernize China (3). Focusing on Nationalist China, Boecking draws on previously unavailable sources from the Second Historical Archives in Nanjing and "analyzes the relationship between the Maritime Customs and the Guomindang only to the extent that it is relevant to a revisionist argument about the success of Nationalist tariff policy in terms of revenue extraction and midterm sustainability" (19). The book chapters present cases of state success and end with wartime failure. Chapter 1 provides a general sketch of protectionism in modern China, with Qianlong's rejection of the Macartney mission serving as a straw man for discussion of how Chinese intellectuals eventually came to accept the legitimacy of foreign trade but demanded tariff control to foster domestic production. Following an unsuccessful attempt to declare tariff autonomy unilaterally, the Guomindang was able to achieve that goal through a series of negotiations with foreign powers set within the interwar context of nationalist movements and mass politics. Chapter 2 turns to how the Guomindang was also able to increase Chinese control [End Page E-5] over Maritime Customs through the appointment of inspector general Frederick Maze (1871–1959), who was widely considered sympathetic to Chinese nationalism and promoted Chinese nationals to higher offices. For Boecking, bilateral treaties and the Guomindang's working relationship with Maze reflect a shift from "revolutionary diplomacy to a more consensual, negotiated approach" (83). Increased tariff revenue allowed the Guomindang to bring the amount of national debt in arrears down from 50% in 1928 to 10% in 1937 and to inspire bondholders' confidence (84). Chapter 3 argues that the Maritime Customs Service's dissemination of scientific expertise and technology intersected with the Guomindang's desire to install a technocratic regime. In particular, its trade statistics provided a uniform, national standard for weights and measures and helped constitute a modern, integrated national economy (105–6). In chapter 4, Boecking focuses on the impact of high tariffs on the consumption of imported sugar, chemical fertilizer, kerosene, and cigarettes. In his view, the Guomindang was committed to increasing government revenue and managing public debt, even at the expense of economic growth and hardship for Chinese consumers (151, 157, 237). Increased tariffs, however, also increased incentives for smuggling, the most serious challenge to the Guomindang's...